An artform I’ve greatly enjoyed experimenting with lately is vector drawing. There’s something I really enjoy about the tedious process of organizing and separating an image into colors. It really forces you to make decisions since the style I’ve been using allows each section to be only one color, so you have to create the illusion of blending, shading, and highlighting with single color selections.

My most recent illustration was my betta fish, of course. His name is BluBo which was an unintentional, silly riff on the former betta fish named BoBo that ended up sticking. It’s been interesting watching his colors change as he has aged. He was once a very vivid and iridescent teal green with some slight red accents, but he’s become deeper blue and the red is only visible in certain lights. Even still, depending on the lighting his former green-tinged iridescence can still be perceived.

I poured a bunch of work into this illustration in a short amount of time because I wanted it to be incorporated into a valentine’s day card. I’m still pleased with the way it came out, and I hope to work with a more dynamically colored image of him next time to keep studying his range of colors.